Byzantium

Byzantium, or the Byzantine Empire, is the modern name for the Eastern Roman Empire. It lasted approximately 1,000 years, until the mid-15th century, and was central to the history of the Middle East and its relationship with western Europe. All the early ecclesiastical councils took place in its territory, and the foundation of its capital Constantinople (today's Istanbul) in the 4th century is quasi-simultaneous with the beginning of the Christianization of the Roman Empire.

After the collapse of Rome and the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, Byzantium became gradually more Greek in language: a hybrid of Greco-Roman and Christian culture. In the 7th century it lost the provinces of Syria and Egypt to the Arab Muslims, after which it remained in a state of war with the Islamic caliphate for centuries.

Theological disputes and competition for power widened the distance of Byzantium with the Church of Rome in the 8th century, and in the year 800 the pope crowned Charlemagne the Holy Roman Emperor; thereafter, the Holy Roman Emperor and the Byzantine emperor both claimed to be the sole rightful inheritors of the Roman Empire.

From the 9th century onward, the Arab Byzantine warfare gradually moved from the eastern frontier to the Eastern Mediterranean, where in the 10th century the rival Fatimid caliphate was established. The 10th and early 11th centuries were periods of revival for Byzantium, which reconquered from the Arabs several Mediterranean islands and territories in northern Syria.

The empire was less successful in southern Italy and Sicily, however, where it lost territories first to the north African Muslims and later to Norman conquerors. Moreover, during the 11th papacy it underwent a series of reforms and claimed the supremacy of the whole church. The culmination of this was the final breakup between the Church of Rome and the Church of Constantinople in the middle-11th century.

In the 1070s the eastern frontier of Byzantium with the caliphate was penetrated for the first time by the Seljuk Turks who occupied much of Asia Minor and also Syria and the Holy Land. As a result, in the 1090s the pope initiated the First Crusade, which led to the establishment in Syria of crusading states under the influence of the Church of Rome.

As the Muslim response against the Crusaders became more organized during the 12th century, it became obvious that Byzantium was interested in recovering its own religious influence in Syria and the Holy Land. The Crusaders, badly in need of resources, ended up redirecting the Fourth Crusade of 1203 to Constantinople instead of Jerusalem. They sacked the city and established the Latin Empire there for almost 60 years.

The Byzantine Empire split into several successor states in Asia Minor and Greece and one of these succeeded in recovering Constantinople and the empire in the 1260s. Although the empire survived for almost another two centuries after its recovery from the Crusaders, the period of the Latin Empire was the beginning of its end; its formal end came with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Byzantine studies have a somewhat controversial and ambiguous position in modern studies that is being revisited in recent years.

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